Classification of religions

Classification of religions, the attempt to systematize and bring order to a vast range of knowledge about religious beliefs, practices, and institutions. It has been the goal of students of religion for many centuries but especially so with the increased knowledge of the world’s religions and the advent of modern methods of scientific inquiry in the last two centuries.

The classification of religions involves: (1) the effort to establish groupings among historical religious communities having certain elements in common or (2) the attempt to categorize similar religious phenomena to reveal the structure of religious experience as a whole.

Function and significance

The many schemes suggested for classifying religious communities and religious phenomena all have one purpose in common: to bring order, system, and intelligibility to the vast range of knowledge about human religious experience. Classification is basic to all science as a preliminary step in reducing data to manageable proportions and in moving toward a systematic understanding of a subject matter. Like zoologists who must distinguish and describe the various orders of animal life as an indispensable stage in the broad attempt to understand the character of such life as a whole, students of religion also must use the tool of classification in their outreach toward a scientific account of human religious experience. The growth of scientific interest in religion in Western universities since the 19th century has compelled most leading students of religion to discuss the problem of classification or to develop classifications of their own.

The difficulty of classifying religions is accounted for by the immensity of religious diversity that history exhibits. As far as scholars have discovered, there has never existed any people, anywhere, at any time, who were not in some sense religious. The individual who embarks upon the arduous task of trying to understand religion as a whole confronts an almost inconceivably huge and bewilderingly variegated host of phenomena from every locale and every era. Empirically, what is called religion includes the mythologies of the preliterate peoples on the one hand and the abstruse speculations of the most advanced religious philosophy on the other. Historically, religion, both ancient and modern, embraces both primitive religious practices and the aesthetically and symbolically refined worship of the more technologically progressive and literate human communities. Students of religion do not lack material for their studies; their problem is rather to discover principles that will help them to avoid the confusion of too much information. Classification is precisely the appeal to such principles; it is a device for making the otherwise unmanageable wealth of religious phenomena intelligible and orderly.

All real science rests on classification and only in case we cannot succeed in classifying the various dialects of faith, shall we have to confess that a science of religion is really an impossibility.

Principles of classification

The criteria employed for the classification of religions are far too numerous to catalogue completely. Virtually all scholars who have considered the matter have evidenced a certain amount of originality in their views of the interrelationships among religious forms. Thus, only some of the more important principles of classification will be discussed.

Normative

Perhaps the most common division of religions—and in many ways the most unsatisfactory—distinguishes true religion from false religion. Such classifications may be discovered in the thought of most major religious groups and are the natural, perhaps inevitable, result of the need to defend particular perspectives against challengers or rivals. Normative classifications, however, have no scientific value, because they are arbitrary and subjective, inasmuch as there is no agreed method for selecting the criteria by which such judgments should be made. But because living religions always feel the need of apologetics (systematic intellectual defenses), normative classifications continue to exist.

Many examples of normative classification might be given. The early Church Fathers (e.g., St. Clement of Alexandria, 2nd century ce) explained that Christianity’s Hellenistic (Greco-Roman culture) rivals were the creations of fallen angels, imperfect plagiarisms of the true religion, or the outcome of divine condescension that took into account the weaknesses of men. The greatest medieval philosopher and theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, distinguished natural religion, or that kind of religious truth discoverable by unaided reason, from revealed religion, or religion resting upon divine truth, which he identified exclusively with Christianity. In the 16th century Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer, forthrightly labelled the religious views of Muslims, Jews, and Roman Catholic Christians to be false and held the view that the gospel of Christianity understood from the viewpoint of justification by grace through faith was the true standard. In Islam, religions are classified into three groups: the wholly true, the partially true, and the wholly false, corresponding with Islam, the Peoples of the Book (Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians), and polytheism. The classification is of particular interest because, being based in the Qurʾān, (the Islamic holy book), it is an integral part of Islamic teaching, and also because it has legal implications for Muslim treatment of followers of other religions.

Although scientific approaches to religion in the 19th century discouraged use of normative categories, elements of normative judgment were, nonetheless, hidden in certain of the new scientific classifications that had emerged. Many evolutionary schemes developed by anthropologists and other scholars, for example, ranked religions according to their places on a scale of development from the simplest to the most sophisticated, thus expressing an implicit judgment on the religious forms discussed. Such schemes more or less clearly assume the superiority of the religions that were ranked higher (i.e., later and more complex); or, conversely, they serve as a subtle attack on all religion by demonstrating that its origins lie in some of humanity’s basest superstitions, believed to come from an early, crude stage. A normative element is also indicated in classification schemes that preserve theological distinctions, such as that between natural and revealed religion. In short, the normative factor still has an important place in the classification of religions and will doubtless always have, since it is extraordinarily difficult to draw precise lines between disciplines primarily devoted to the normative exposition of religion, such as theology and philosophy of religion, and disciplines devoted to its description (phenomenology of religion) or scientific study (e.g., anthropology of religion, sociology of religion, or psychology of religion).

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